Digital Marketing Concept – 4Ts of Digital Marketing Operations

In March 1950, Willie Sutton, a prolific American bank robber, was asked by a news reporter about why during his 45-year criminal career he only stole banks. Willie simply answered, “Because that’s where the money is”.

When it comes to business the reason why you should focus on marketing is the same, that’s where the money is!

From that time, people missed the real meaning of marketing, they thought it was advertising, branding, or promotion. Here below is a simple way to understand the meaning of marketing.

Imagine a conference is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “The big conference is coming this Saturday” that’s advertising.

If you put out the sign on the back of a truck and drive it into town that’s promotion.

If the truck was well decorated and the local newspaper writes about it, that’s publicity.

If the town citizens go to the conference, you show them how much knowledge they’ll have, explain to them how much fun they’ll have spending money at the conference booths, that’s sales.

And if you planned the whole thing, that’s marketing. Yup, it’s as simple as that – marketing is the strategy you use for getting your ideal target market to know you, like you and trust you enough to become a customer.

The modern marketing era started in 1960 when Jerome McCarthy came up with the “4P’s of Marketing” concept that sets up controllable variables to help brands influence their buyers’ response.

After 7 years, Philip Kotler, the father of modern marketing, had popularized this concept in his book & make it the marketing bible.

The digital age took off with the coming of the internet and development of the web 1.0 platform (1989) when users were allowed to find the information they wanted but not allowed to share this information over the web. During the late 1990s, simple company websites that were text-based began to flourish. They were initially utilized to provide information about a company’s products or services.

The first company to have a digital marketing campaign was Bristol-Myers Squibb to promote their Excedrin product.

Today, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year on the marketing business and marketers start to readjust their strategies to meet the progressive changes in consumer needs, similar to what a football coach does to win the world cup.

You are the coach of the national football team participating in the world cup.

Your job as a coach is to create a winning team that will hold the world cup trophy.

You’ll need first to build a great strategy, to win this international championship, that may lead your team toward the right timing, the right passes, and the right sprints toward the goal.

A professional digital marketer should do the same when it comes to growing his businesses in the digital age. Where he needs to start with having a clear vision, precise tactics on how to empower his team, look into each possible solution, predict the possible outcomes, and pick the wisest choices through a well-formulated digital marketing strategy.

But as a smart coach you can’t win the world cup alone though, you need a team including the best players and substitutes supported with assistants, someone focusing on the defense, another guy for the attack, another again trains the goalkeepers. Digital Marketing players are the channels & tools marketers use to achieve their goals. For instance, Social Media Marketing is a Channel whereas the actual networks — Facebook, Instagram, etc. — are the tools. They will help to drive the team to perform at its best and score goals.

There are infinite options in both Football and Digital Marketing yet you don’t go for every possible solution, you choose the smartest solution and you push through it as you go.

As experienced football coach, you must be aware that not all football legends are born some are formulated by hard will and professional training. You as a coach should continuously evaluate your team and work on potential star players to become legends. Whereas digital marketers should follow the same plan, always evaluate their available resources and empower the potential capabilities of their team, to reach their goals smoothly and quickly.

To win the world cup, your team must out-perform other teams and to do so you must be of course going throughout each game and tracking your team’s performance by looking at your teams’ possession rate, the number of passes and shots, fouls, and cards. These are your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

Smart digital marketers follow the same analogy by continuously tracking their strategy, used tools, and team’s capabilities to be aware of any future bump or shift.

In brief, whether a football team needs to win the world cup or a business needs to grow in this digital age, they both should have a clear plan/strategy, select and use the right tools, work on developing available capabilities and track the performance throughout the way.

This success formula was combined in my marketing concept the “4ts of Digital Marketing Operations”

After more than 50 years from the introduction of the 4P’s, I think the time has come to create a new marketing concept that meets the digital age & allows brands to simply manage & implement any digital marketing activity.

On January 9, 2017, after 17 years of experience in digital marketing and studying the market requirements and analyzing the active digital marketing campaigns, I have come up with the “4T’s of Digital Marketing Operations” a Lebanese marketing concept that can be implemented internationally.

The 4T’s of Digital Marketing Operations is a new marketing concept that combines and derives benefits from its 4 factors of success (Tactics, Tools, Training & Tracking) to cost-effectively accomplish the operations’ desired goals and objectives.

This marketing concept is flexible and tailored to meet all business sizes:

1- If you have a small & medium-sized company that is operating without a digital marketing strategy, then the “4t’s of Digital Marketing Operations” is your solution.

2. If you are an individual with a free profession (Doctors, lawyers, Public Figures….) then “The 4t’s of Personal Online Branding” fits you, especially that nowadays the personal branding becomes the company brand.

3. If you are a member or have a big company with running digital marketing operations then the “4T’s in Reverse” is good for you to benchmark & evaluate these operations.

Would a pilot take off without a flight plan, inspecting the plane, and ensuring that it has enough fuel to make it to the final destination? (Tactics).

When taking off, would the pilot shut down the instrument panel and silence the radio while flight? (Tools).

Can anyone fly a plane without signing up for thorough Training? When taking off, would the pilot turn off the radar? (Tracking).

Of course not, without a flight plan, training, radar & the instruments, especially the radio the pilot wouldn’t be able to detect any threat, know how the plane is functioning; and communicate about the flight plans. He could look out of the window (similar to what most digital marketers do today) but would not have enough scope of vision to keep the plane safe. Eventually, the pilot would be flying blind.

The same analogy shall be also followed nowadays in creating your effective digital marketing operations, representing the main pillars of “The 4T’s”.

A CEO of a successful business in the digital age must have the “4Ts-CEO” mindset in which he says:

- “I need a new planning model that helps me to create a never seen before digital marketing strategy for my business”. (That represents the first T – TACTICS planning Model)

- “I want to build an in-house automation customer acquisition system” (Representing the second T- Tools)

- “I want to create an in-house all-stars team with digital skills” (Implementing the third T – Training)

- “I want a real-time tracking solution measuring the performance of my online operations and their effect on the offline conversions” (Using the forth T – Tracking)

You can think of your business as a chess game. To win a chess game, smart players use unexpected chess opening moves, the same analogy must be followed by businesses, where their marketing team should start with preparing a competitive business strategy, or outsourcing it to an agency, denoted in the 4Ts® marketing concept as TACTICS ® planning model, in order to tap into unseen opportunities and set them apart from their competitors.

This powerful lesson used in the 4Ts® marketing concept was embedded in Netflix’s latest hit series The Queen’s Gambit, where we were taught that successful chess players know that a strong opening can become the difference between winning and losing the game and this is what gives them an early competitive edge over their opponents.

How you should pave the road toward your ultimate goal?

The first pillar of the “4Ts” representing the base part of any effective digital marketing operation. It is the “how” of everything (who, what, where, when & why), simply it is your digital marketing strategy with a digital transformation twist which aims to boost your business growth and succeed in the digital transformational age, help you achieve your business objectives & generating more online & offline leads.

TACTICS is made of the below ingredients:

• T: Target Audience: Define the kind of people you’ll be talking to, how to speak to them, where to find them, and what they want from your brand

• A: Approach: Determine your main digital marketing operations’ goal with the date of its accomplishment, review your brand ideology and amplify your brand’s competitive advantage.

• C: Coordination: Synchronizing between online and offline activities.

• T: Trajectory: Assign your customers’ buying journey to understand their purchasing behavior (before, during & after)

• I: Innovation Strategy: Plan to grow your market share & profits through product and service innovation to gain new competitive advantages.

• C: Communication Strategy: Set up the methods of your online activities including what your organization wishes to share with the public and whom to reach along with preparing the communication during and after any online crisis

• S: Situation Analysis: Review your brand's current situation, capabilities & activities to discover its strengths and overcome the weaknesses online

A lot of marketers forget that marketing strategy is a living document that should be updated and reviewed constantly.

You can think of strategy renewals like pruning trees!

Pruning will lead trees to grow faster and produce better fruit. The same happens when renewing your strategy, it clears your mind and redirects energy toward real priorities.

Therefore your company’s digital marketing strategy should be renewed at least once a year as an average.

Which tools you should use to reach your assigned objectives?

Digital transformation is not only about tools, but these tools and technologies play a vital role toward a digitally transformed business. The second “T” in the concept represents the needed digital marketing tools that can help you to achieve your company’s objectives.

One of the main problems businesses are facing today is that they are relying only on referrals and word of mouth not on the right digital marketing tools to generate leads.

That’s why selecting and effectively using the right digital marketing tools will help you build an automated customer acquisition system in place and no longer rely only on referrals and word of mouth.

But selecting the appropriate digital marketing tools to use is a tricky process, not like Christmas shopping, you should take some time to narrow down which tools would be most beneficial for your business to use, and that matches your exact business model and operational requirements.

There are numerous ways to boost your business performance online and hundreds upon hundreds of digital marketing tools to choose from, that are listed mainly under the below categories:

• Organic Social Media Tools

• Social Media Automation Tools

• Social Media Monitoring Tools

• Paid Advertising Tools

• Email Marketing Tools

• Display Retargeting Tools

• Website Testing Tools

• Video Hosting Tools

• Content Creation Tools

• Website Analytics Tools

• Search Engine Optimization

Technology also provides you with continuous data, helping you to learn what your customers like, don’t like, and even what they’re interested in from moment to moment. Social listening can reveal incredible insights into what they want.

Ever heard of cross-pollination? It’s when bees spread pollen between a variety of plants, bringing about variations of species that better withstand time and nature. In this case, marketers can be compared to these well-traveled bees.

When you diversify the use of marketing tools and methods, you have a greater chance of reaching new audiences and generating new leads, creates a balance between risk and reward, meaning if one tool begins to fail, it’s easier to reallocate funds for a new, better-performing method.

The democracy in using these tools & technologies puts in your hands the needed resources to perform sales and marketing processes that were only accessible to big companies, so why not make full use of this privilege. Digital Marketing Tools can help your business despite its size to lead more conversions, generate better revenue and facilitate your engagement with your target audience, potential customer, and even your current customers especially if you select the proper tools to use with assigning their working module and the timeline for the operation.

Selecting the right tools with the needed budget to spend on marketing (around 10% of the yearly revenue), is one part of the magic, whereas translating your marketing strategy into words (copy-writing) and your messages into visually appealing communication (design) is the second complementary part, since it will be responsible for the positive perceptions your customers will have about your brand.

Therefore, it is highly recommended nowadays for brands to focus on their core competencies and collaborate with professional and well-experienced digital marketing agencies to prepare the required creatives and manage the necessary online campaigns for a better return on investment.

Every party has its superpowers and special skills to add to the company since marketing can’t be played solo, so collaborating on basis of shared responsibilities is the ideal solution, where missions will be divided between brand & agency in reference to what each party can handle more effectively.

How to effectively use the available tools to fulfill your goals?

Digital transformation is not just about organizational change, it's also about personal change. The entire organization cannot be transformed if you fail to change and develop your own/team skills and habits.

In sport you can't coach speed; you were either born fast or you weren't. Training and technique can develop and refine speed but can't make a slow athlete fast. That's not the case in business.

In July 2012, Marissa Mayer was named CEO of Yahoo after its tragic annual revenue dropped from 7.2 billion USD to 4.9 billion USD in four years Mayer's goal was to bring Yahoo to the level of big four and achieve double-digit annual growth in five years along with eight additional highly challenging targets.
But in summer 2016, after 4 years, Mayer had fallen and not only remained flat at around 4.9 billion USD, but the firm had reported a loss of 4.4 billion USD.
The main fault that Marissa Mayer did was overlooking the Yahoo team's low capabilities and resources resulting from the companies tragic drop and setting in return stretch goals that are hard to achieve.

These are the main reasons behind assigning "Training” as the 3rd pillar of digital marketing operations. By training we mean the capabilities development that brands need to transfer the prepared strategy into reality.

Our great Information Age, also known as the Digital Age, is characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer and communicate information freely all over the digital platforms, and doing so is way different from face-to-face communication. You need to know the fundamentals of using digital marketing tools and how to effectively pass your company’s messages all over the needed digital tools.

Strategy implementation basics: 96% of well-formulated strategies fail due to a lack of the implementation process. Having an effective strategy implementation requires practical knowledge in several aspects similar to translating goals into measurable objectives and manage effective internal communication aligning the organizations' managerial structure and culture with the strategic needs and much more.

Training Program must be an ongoing process that refers to acquiring, applying and constantly updating the knowledge gained. But of course, training can’t produce results alone. There are other non-training factors that are requested from stakeholders after any training.

They should encourage, reinforce, and reward their employees for the gained knowledge and skills they are applying to their jobs.

The main issue here is getting more managers to support the training program and more trainees to apply what they learned in order to get concrete and valuable results.

Where to look to keep track of your route of progress to your ultimate goal?

John Wanamaker (1838-1922) is credited with the saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” While this was understandable a century ago when it was first said, it is a crime to say that today. Not measuring where your leads and sales come from and not tracking the Return on Investment of Digital Marketing is the mark of an amateur since what gets measured gets managed.

That's what triggered me to think about “Tracking” as the fourth pillar of the “4Ts” marketing concept, that will support your business in measuring results, modifying your future actions to fulfill your assigned goals smoothly.

When thinking about digital marketing tracking, the first thing that comes to marketers' minds is tracking the performance of digital marketing tools and campaigns, similar but not limited to, website visitors, Social Media engagement, App downloads…

What they miss is a vital part of tracking that covers the tracking of strategic goals and objectives and evaluating the capabilities of their resources.

To have a well-formulated tracking operation, you should first define your strategic goals and assign the measurable aspects to measure their success along the way to your desired result, and then select the appropriate digital tools with the target numbers responsible for the coming phase success. Finally, determine what measures you'll be evaluating your training program to maintain and develop the needed capabilities and resources to achieve your goals in the first place.

4Ts of Digital Marketing Operations

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4Ts OF DIGITAL MARKETING OPERATIONS

"OUR SECRET SAUCE FOR SUCCESS"

BY JOE GHANTOUS, FOUNDER OF RIGHT SERVICE

Last Updated on 13 April 2021 - Version 7.17

Read The Arabic Version

Being a Digital Marketer Is Like Being a Coach of a Football Team

ON JANUARY 9, 2017 I CAME UP WITH THE 4TS MARKETING CONCEPT

THINK OF “DIGITAL MARKETING OPERATIONS” LIKE FLYING A PLANE!

4Ts®-CEO Mindset

Opening Moves in the 4Ts® Marketing Concept

TACTICS

YOUR STRATEGY PLANNING MODEL

TOOLS

DIGITAL MARKETING TOOLS

TRAINING

DIGITAL CAPABILITIES DEVELOPMENT

TRACKING

MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUR ONLINE OPERATIONS

4TS MARKETING CONCEPT ACCORDING TO JOE GHANTOUS

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